PATERSON – A Wendy’s Restaurant, public parking garage and community college buildings stand on the block of Broadway between Church Street and Memorial Drive. They blend into the city’s downtown landscape in a nondescript sort of way.

In the middle of the 19th century, when Paterson was a thriving industrial city, the location was home the Excelsior Coffee and Spice Factory, a large prosperous business owned by one of the wealthiest men in the city.

And within this factory, in some dark and secret place, runaway slaves once hid away, waiting for the right moment to continue their journey North on the Underground Railroad. The factory itself was demolished in the 1980s, back before local historians were able to find hard evidence of the building’s role in escaped slaves’ route to freedom.

But now local history advocates along with descendants of the families that were involved in the Underground Railroad stop are conducting a fund-raising campaign to build a monument at the site.

For now, an engraved stone marks the spot. It is a placeholder for the proposed monument designed to honor Josiah Huntoon, the white owner of the coffee factory, and William Van Rensalier, his black apprentice, business partner, and lifelong friend. Both were ardent abolitionists.

But until a few years ago, nobody knew just how much help they had given to escaped slaves on their perilous journey, according to Kenneth Simpson, vice chairman of Paterson’s Historic Preservation Commission, and Jimmy Richardson, a local historian and volunteer. Simpson and Richardson are among those who support the construction of the new monument.

The history of the site has been peeled away in recent years like layers of an onion. One of the key figures was Dolores Van Rensalier, the great granddaughter of the factory owner’s apprentice.

Dolores Van Rensalier grew up in California without knowing of her African-American roots. She said she was raised to believe she was white. As a teenager, she began to suspect otherwise when she began poking around into her family history. She said she learned one of her ancestors was an abolitionist who worked as an apprentice at the coffee and spice factory.

Van Rensalier said her mother also told her that he had that William Van Rensalier had been a “conductor on the railroad.” Only through further research did she learn that the railroad on her great grandfather has served was not the conventional type.

More than a decade after the factory had been demolished, the Paterson historic commission was asked to designate the site as a historic landmark, historians said. But the panel members needed more proof of the location’s significance.

That’s when Dolores Van Rensalier found a pivotal document – writings done in 1904 by Josiah Huntoon’s son, Louis, who was doing his own genealogical research.

In that manuscript, Louis Huntoon wrote that the basement of his father’s home as well as that of the coffee and spice factory had been used as a way-station on the Underground Railroad. He even recalled how his sister would carry food and blankets to the fugitives hidden down in the cellar. That evidence prompted the city’s historic commission to designate the site a local landmark in 1996, Van Rensalier said.

Dolores Van Rensalier recalled her first visit to the site. “When I saw that it was an abandoned lot, I was devastated,” she said. “But then I had the realization that below this very ground, slaves were being brought to freedom. That was a very moving moment for me.”

Simpson and Richardson have some theories on the factories role in the Underground Railroad. They pointed out that two blocks from Huntoon’s factory stood the Godwin Street African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, an organization that they say had played an integral part in America’s Underground Railroad. Among AME Church members around were the country were Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, according to Simpson and Richardson.

“If this weren’t enough,” said Richardson, “the Huntoon factory also lay within a few blocks of the Erie Line railroad, which ran North, so slaves could potentially use it to escape.”

Dolores Van Rensalier found additional references to the Underground Railroad’s role in Paterson in a “historical facts” pamphlet distributed by city officials in the 1960s. The pamphlet said that runaway slaves would make their way to the city and hide out on Garret Mountain. There they would wait, until the path was clear of danger, according to the pamphlet. Then Huntoon or Van Rensalier would light a lantern from the highest point of the factory to signal to the runaways that it was safe to come out of hiding and into the factory.

Van Rensalier, Richardson, and Simpson said the new monument will be completed by the summer. The construction is being handled by the Huntoon-Van Rensalier Underground Railroad Foundation, an organization founded by Dolores herself. The treasurer of the organization is Ronald Van Rensalier, another descendant of William.

She said the total cost of the memorial will be $335,000, with $210,000 going to the design and construction of the monument, and the rest going to landscaping and design of the lot. The Paterson Parking Authority has contributed $210,000 towards the monument, and the Foundation is in the process of fundraising for the remainder by selling personally engraved bricks to be laid at the site, Van Rensalier said.

Simpson stated that renowned African American sculptor Ed Dwight is designing the monument. Passaic County Community College is currently putting together an Underground Railroad Library, as a sister project to this memorial, he added.

The discovery of her identity and the subsequent uncovering of Paterson’s role in the Underground Railroad prompted Dolores to co-author a book on the subject with Ramapo College professor Flavia Alaya. It is called Bridge Street to Freedom: Landmarking a Station on the Underground Railroad.